Achieve Your Target Grade In

GCSE Maths In Four Weeks

Work Less. Boost Results.

Jeevan Singh

1

Legal Disclaimer 2016 © GCSE Maths For Schools

All Rights Reserved: No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any informational storage or retrieval system without express written, dated and signed permission from the author.

Disclaimer and / or Legal Notices The information presented herein represents the views of the author as of the date of publication. Due to the rate at which conditions change, the author reserve the right to alter, change and update the information based on any new changes. The guide is for informational purposes only. While every attempt is made to verify the information provided in this report, neither the author nor their partners assume any responsibility for errors, inaccuracies or omissions. This report does not guarantee nor imply guaranteed results in examinations. Results are dependent on your students’ efforts and experience. There is no guarantee that they will achieve their target grades using the techniques and ideas presented in this document. Results in examinations are entirely dependent on the person employing these techniques and ideas. Their level of success depends on the time they devote to the ideas and techniques mentioned. Since these factors differ according to individuals we cannot guarantee their success nor are we responsible for any of their own actions.

2

About Me

Dear sir/miss, Thank you for taking the time to read this report. My name is Jeevan Singh and I’m a tutor, author and education specialist. Growing up, I overachieved in my maths exams – scoring an A* grade at GCSE and A-level maths. People thought I was ‘smart’ or ‘gifted’ but to tell you the truth, I was far from it. I was just an average student. The reason why I overachieved in my maths exams is because I took an unusual approach to revision. I used to do things back to front... The great thing about my unusual approach was it allowed me to free up half of my time so I could still do the things I enjoyed such as playing playstation or watching films. You see, there is a big misconception when it comes to revision. Students presume you have to work harder to get better results. In fact, the polar opposite is true. You can work less and still get better results. After finishing my A-levels, I studied maths at a top university – Kings College London. Since I left university a couple of years ago, I’ve run a successful tutoring company in the West London area and created several books and programs on passing exams in the most efficient way possible. I specialise in helping individuals get the best results whilst putting the least amount of effort in. In this report, I will explain how I was able to cut my teaching workload in half and still boost the results of all my students. The education system, as a whole, is going through a transition at the moment and if we don’t plan for this change, more students will underperform in their maths exams and our workloads will increase significantly until it reaches breaking point.

3

Why Things Could Get A Whole Lot Worse

Do you feel you’re working too hard at the moment? A recent survey conducted by the NUT (National Union of Teachers) found: 90% of teachers said they had considered giving up teaching during the last two years because of the workload. 87% said they knew one or more colleagues who HAD given up during that time because of the workload. 96% said their workload had negative consequences for their family or personal life. According to the DfE (Department for Education), secondary school teachers have a 55-hour-work-week, on average. The truth is, it could get a whole lot worse. Here are our GCSE maths results, as a nation, over the past 20 years or so:

As you can see in the A* - C column, our pass rate has improved by 17 percentage points over the past 20 years. That’s not bad. Teachers have clearly done a good job and we’re heading in the right direction.

4

The last thing we should do now is fiddle with the education system. But no. Not the government. They want to make our lives as difficult as possible. They base our performance solely on the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) rankings. As you know, we will always have a poor showing when compared to the rest of the world. In 2009, the UK were ranked 28th in maths. Three years later, we climbed up by 2 places to 26th. That’s not amazing but nonetheless, it’s still an improvement. However, the government want us to be up there amongst the best performing countries such as China and Singapore. So in September 2015, they raised the school leaving age to 18. Students who fail their GCSE maths have to study the subject until they’re 18. The GCSE maths curriculum has also been revamped. A new grading system has been put in place (9-1), coursework has been scrapped and harder topics have been included in the syllabus. Do you think the government have jumped the gun here by making the specification more rigorous? Isn’t this a quick-fix without considering the long term impact on results and the daily lives of teachers? Think about it. It’s common sense. If exams get tougher, more students will underperform and results will decline. This in turn, puts more pressure on you and your workload will increase.

5

Is this what you really want? How do we prepare for the ‘tough times’ ahead?

6

How To Reduce Your Workload

Before I explain how to reduce your workload, let’s consider Vilfredo Pareto’s law. Who is Vilfredo Pareto? Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian economist-sociologist who lived from 1848 to 1923. He discovered the 80/20 law after investigating the wealth distribution in Italy i.e. 80% of income was owned by only 20% of the population.

Although this law was discovered in economics, it is also seen in all other areas of life. Thus, the law can be rephrased as follows: 80% of your outputs come from only 20% of your inputs. Let’s take this law and apply it to teaching: 80% of your students’ results come from only 20% of your activities. If you work a 55-hour-week, only 11 of these hours will contribute directly to your students’ results. The remaining 44 hours will not. It sounds bizarre but it’s actually true. Can you think of any activities that do not directly contribute to your students’ results? I can. Planning lessons and marking work. The latter, marking your students’ work, has the biggest drain on your time. Marking your students’ work is a tedious and time-consuming process. And worse, it has no direct impact on your students’ results. As a matter of fact, it can hinder their progress as the student cannot see first-hand where they’re going wrong. It’s very important students identify their own mistakes so they can eradicate them going forward.

7

So how can you reduce your workload and boost your students’ results at the same time? The answer is to systemise the activities that don’t directly contribute to your students’ progress and focus on the ones that do. I’ll give you a small example. When I first started tutoring, a single one-hour lesson would easily turn into 2-3 hours because I had to plan it, mark previous homework and have discussions with parents. That’s why I created pre-made lesson plans and used them for all my students. I also encouraged my students to mark their own homework by providing solutions to exercises. This boosted my students’ results in the long run because they could identify their weaknesses and rectify them in their own time. If a parent wanted to speak to me, I would arrange a meeting on my terms. By making these simple changes, my workload reduced by 50% yet the results of all my students improved. Here are some ways to systemise some of your activities... With regards to marking, you could outsource this to a PA. This is what the head of maths of my old high school does.

8

The issues with this are it may reduce your salary as you have to pay your assistant and again, your students will not see first-hand where they’re going wrong and why. When you’re looking for worksheets/exercises to give to your students, make sure they come with solutions too. Detailed solutions are not ideal. Model solutions work best because it gives students a chance to figure out how they arrived at the final answer. Maths is all about critical thinking and the only way students develop this is if they ‘go through the struggle’ and think deeply about each answer. If the worksheet/exercise does not provide answers with it too, don’t use it. You should set the worksheet/exercise in lesson. Go through 1 or 2 examples with the entire class and let the students work through the rest on their own, in silence. For homework, you would provide them with the model/detailed solutions and instruct your students to mark their own work and correct any questions they got wrong in class. In the following lesson, you will go through any common problems your students faced. Then, you simply repeat this process. By allowing the students to mark their own work, you’ll instantly reduce your workload by at least 25% You may have to take in their work on the first 2 or 3 occasions to double-check their marking but after a few lessons, you won’t have to take it in any longer. Your students’ marking will be fairly accurate. The only thing you can do is make a note of their scores in an Excel spreadsheet. This will allow you to gauge their performance over time. However, as long as students mark their own work, they will have a good idea of their own progress. I would strongly advise that you create a Facebook group for your maths class outside of lesson. Your students will inevitably run into problems whilst they complete their homework and if there isn’t a platform to post their problems on, progress will stagnate. Ultimately, progress is made at home and not entirely at school. Creating a Facebook group is simple; all you need to do is create a Facebook account, add all of your students as friends (the majority of kids are on Facebook these days) and invite them to join your group.

9

This gives your class an opportunity to share their problems with their peers. I offer a similar service in my tuition company and it works very well. There is always a small group of students who outperform the rest of the class so you could let them answer your students’ queries on your behalf. Hence, reducing your workload even more. There is a danger, however, with giving basic revision questions/exercises in lesson; students are not learning how to apply these principles in an exam context. You’ve probably heard your students say this many times in the past: “the questions in the textbook are nothing like the ones in the exam!” One of the reasons why so many students underachieve in their maths exams every year is because they fail to see the link between maths concepts and exam-style questions. That’s why you’re better off giving past paper questions to your students from the off. Develop their exam technique as early as possible.

10

Your students will have a greater chance of achieving or surpassing their target grades by the time of their exam. I used to give basic revision questions to students I tutored in my local area but I’ve stopped it altogether. I only focus on past paper questions and exam technique because this will have a direct impact on their results and not necessarily basic revision/exercise questions. The great thing about past papers is they come with model solutions so you can give these to your students too (as homework). Private schools adopt a similar approach in their teaching; they focus solely on past paper questions and exam technique. They only refer to textbooks or the theory sections of the syllabus for consolidation. This is what I mean by doing things ‘back to front’. Private schools are the best performing schools in the country so why not model what they do?

To reduce your planning time, I’d highly recommend that you use my GCSE Maths In Four Weeks program. It comes with ready-made lesson plans so all you need to do is swipe and deploy them into your lessons.

11

Why Students Underachieve In Their Maths Exams

Your students are not doing you any favours. They don’t do enough at home. But you can’t blame them. The ‘usual’ approach to revision is a tedious process. The thought of sitting in a quiet room, reading and making notes from a large textbook does not paint a pretty picture. This is the main reason why students are not motivated to work at home. They ‘presume’ revision is a painful task... But it doesn’t have to be and I’ll show you how. As I said before, the 80/20 law can apply to any situation including revision. This means 20% of their revision time contributes to 80% of their end result. At the moment, students spend too much time on the 80% of activities that do not directly contribute to their end result. This is the typical process that your students follow when revising at home:

This is where 80% of their time and effort is being wasted: Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying they should never look at a revision guide or take any notes. That would be absurd. But it’s the order in which they carry out these tasks that will make a huge difference when it comes to efficiency and results.

Revision Guide Note-taking Exam Paper Review/mark

scheme

Revision Guide Note-taking Exam Paper

80%

Review/mark scheme

12

What most students do is take a front to back approach. They buy the first revision guide in sight (and usually it’s too big to revise from), read through it and make detailed notes. They will not move onto the exam papers unless they’ve ‘learned’ all of the content. It’s almost as if it’s a crime if they don’t finish that revision guide.

However, reading through a revision guide and making detailed notes in the beginning has virtually no impact on their results. Give one of your students a revision guide and tell them to pick a chapter, read through it and make notes. Then, after an hour or two, test them on the chapter they made notes from. I will guarantee that he/she won’t remember most of the stuff they wrote down. It’s only when they go over it a second, third or fourth time, it begins to stick. How inefficient. Also, not everything from the revision guide will feature in the exam so they could be writing down stuff they don’t even need. This is exactly how your students are revising at home and as you can see, it is costing them (and you) hugely.

13

When I revised for my GCSE and A-Level maths, I didn’t read a revision guide or make any notes to begin with and I got an A* grade in the end. So where is the 20% of activities that will contribute to 80% of their results? Here it is:

The review and mark scheme phase is the most crucial area of their revision yet it’s often overlooked. This is the only area where scores and grades actually improve. Most students focus on the first two phases, spend some time on the third and very little to no time on the final phase. The reason being is they get so bogged down on reading the revision guide and writing notes that they don’t spend anywhere near as much time on exam papers and review. I’ll explain why the review and the mark scheme section is the most important phase with a scenario. Suppose a student has just finished going through their revision guide and they’re ready to tackle the past papers. By the way, they should score 100% on the first paper if they learnt everything from the revision guide right? However, in reality, this never happens. Even if somebody goes through the entire revision guide first, they’ll still get a fairly low score (usually around the 50% mark) on the first practice paper they take. I used to myself. It’s just the way it goes. They’re new to practice papers and they’re somewhat different to the questions in the revision guide. Anyway, back to the scenario... Suppose you give 5 past papers to this student and they complete them one after the other. What result do you expect them to get in each one? They would get the exact same score in every paper. Hence, they’ve made no progress. The only way their score will improve is if they review their papers as they go along.

Revision Guide Note-taking Exam Paper Review/mark

scheme

20%

14

They need to see first-hand where they’re going wrong and why. Then, they don’t make the same mistakes in the next paper. If they follow that small rule of thumb, their results will keep improving.

It sounds obvious but most students don’t take the time to review their work and then they complain afterwards when they don’t see an improvement in their results. I often say to my students... “Completing an exam paper and not reviewing it critically is as good as not completing the paper at all.” This is because they’ll never identify their weaknesses. How do they expect their results to improve if they never identify their mistakes and rectify them? Also, how do examiners mark their papers? They refer to a mark scheme. Students need to understand the mark scheme and how marks are awarded and deducted.

15

If they provide the examiner with everything they’re looking for, it will be very difficult for them to get a low score in the exam. You may wonder: “If I give my students past papers from the off, would I run out of them nearer the time of the actual exam?” No, you won’t. As a matter of fact, I have dozens of papers (and mark schemes) dating back to 2003. It took me an awful long time to put together. If you want them, shoot me an email: jeevan@gcsemathsforschools.co.uk and I will send them through. The great thing about some of the older papers (2007 – 2010) is they’re a tad easier than the papers you find these days. Your students can use these papers as a ‘learning process’ to pick up new concepts and improve their exam technique. Then, they can treat the 2011 papers and onwards as real exams. That’s plenty of practice for them. Students taking the new specification (9-1) should make use of them too. Most of your students are taking the higher-tier and not much has changed. The only difference is they’ve thrown in a few extra harder questions at the end of the paper to separate the 9 (A**) and 8 (A*) grade students. These questions are not a huge step-up for students who are currently working on an A/A* grade. It won’t affect students working lower down the scale (4-6) as they won’t answer the questions towards the end anyway. The questions ranging from grades 4 to 6 will be more or less the same as the questions you find in the old-style GCSE papers.

16

How Exactly Should Students Revise At Home?

After working closely with many students on a one-to-one basis in the past, I saw the haphazard way in which they were revising at home. Ultimately, students’ final grades are determined by what they do at home and not entirely at school or tuition. That’s why, in January 2014, I created a 4 week GCSE Maths revision program for students to adopt at home.

All they have to do is copy the same step-by-step strategy I used at home to get an A* in GCSE maths, and their results will improve considerably. It is based around the 80/20 law. It will show students how they can boost their GCSE Maths grades in half the time. It consists of a 200 page manual which covers the GCSE and IGCSE specifications. The manual is divided into lessons, all of which contain key notes on the topic being studied followed by a number of typical exam questions and model solutions. Hence, there is no reason for students to rewrite notes and they can focus solely on the 20% of activities that will directly boost their results such as exam technique and review. Detailed solutions of the most difficult exam questions are provided on 3 DVD’s that accompany the main revision guide. In total, there are over 8 hours of video footage.

17

The package is complete with a smaller booklet containing 30 of the best shortcuts ever discovered in GCSE Maths. The program is suitable for all exam boards including the new (9-1) specification released in September last year. Here is what Abbie Marsh, a year 10 student from London, said after using my program recently:

I recently tested my strategy on a 10 year old student and he passed his GCSE maths exam in one month! (For more case studies like this, please visit my website: www.gcsemathsforschools.co.uk)

18

If we can show students that revision does not necessarily have to be a ‘painful’ experience, then we are really onto a winner. Students will be more motivated to work at home and results will improve. They will be less dependent on teachers and as a result, your workload will reduce significantly. Students and schools up and down the UK are currently using my GCSE Maths revision program and reaping the benefits. If you’d like to use it in your school, please visit my website for more information: www.gcsemathsforschools.co.uk. I look forward to helping your school get a better GCSE Maths pass rate. To your success, Jeevan Singh Maths specialist & Author